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It’s been two-and-a-half years since the EU referendum, but with just 56 days to go until the UK is due to leave the European Union it is still anyone’s guess what sort of departure that will be.

That a government would leave something so important, so late is simply unforgivable, and if it doesn’t make you angry it ought to.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of Brexit, this will be the biggest change this country has seen since the Second World War. It will affect every man, woman and child in the country, every business and every public service, and that impact will be felt for years to come, possibly decades.

The fact that none of us know what sort of change this will be, with less than two months to go, is mind-boggling.

Will Theresa May have to ask for an extension?

Compare this situation to the roll-out of Universal Credit, which in the grand scheme of things is a much smaller change. UC has been introduced in phases, with different people in different parts of the country moved onto the benefit at different times. Government officials, local authorities, landlords and voluntary groups were given months to prepare, knowing how the new system would work (at least in theory) well ahead of its introduction. And yet even with this softly-soflty approach, UC has been plagued with problems from the outset.

How much worse would it have been if all seven million benefit claimants had been moved simultaneously on day one, with just a few weeks’ warning? Even local councils give anything up to a year’s notice before moving to a new recycling system.

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And the thing is, it didn’t need to be this way. While Theresa May now seems to be taking a pragmatic approach to Brexit, she is mostly to blame for the situation the country finds itself in.

Here are some of the mistakes she has made along the way: triggering Article 50 and starting the two-year countdown before the government had decided on a Brexit policy; calling an unnecessary general election after triggering Article 50, thus wasting more time; contriving to lose her majority in the election, despite a massive lead in the polls, making it even harder to get her deal approved by Parliament; setting mutually incompatible ‘red lines’ in her Brexit policy, which make the controversial Northern Ireland backstop a necessity; wasting another month by needlessly delaying the meaningful vote on her withdrawal agreement, which she was always going to lose.

The latest mistake is to play along with her backbenchers’ demands for the backstop to be removed, even though the EU has made it clear that this cannot happen – indeed, the Prime Minister herself was very insistent on this very point just a few weeks ago.

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So it seems extremely unlikely that the deal that Mrs May will put before the Commons on February 14 will be substantially different to the one that was rejected so comprehensively on January 15.

Even at this late stage I think there is still a way of getting a deal through Parliament by March 29, but this would involve some genuine cross-party working and perhaps losing the support of the DUP and the Conservatives’ hard Brexiteers, which seems politically unfeasible at the moment.

Instead, it seems increasingly likely that more time will be needed to hammer out a deal that will be acceptable to MPs and the EU. No doubt some people will crow about ‘betrayal’ if Brexit is delayed by even a day, but surely this is too important for the long-term future of this country to be overly concerned about a bit of short-term negative publicity. And at the end of the day, the government could have avoided delaying Brexit if it had used the time it had more effectively.

Mrs May will probably have to ask for an extension to her deadline, as my uni friend did. And just like my friend, she only has herself to blame.